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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24396316">if you love me, come clean</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/basementmixtape/pseuds/basementmixtape'>basementmixtape</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Best Friends to Lovers, Boys In Love, M/M, Richie Tozier Loves Eddie Kaspbrak, Richie Tozier-centric, very soft and sad</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-05-26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 06:54:49</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,146</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24396316</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/basementmixtape/pseuds/basementmixtape</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>“I had a panic attack in Bill's bathroom because I realized I'm in love with you.”</p><p>-</p><p>Richie Tozier comes clean.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>88</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>if you love me, come clean</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>title taken from if you love me, come clean by flatsound</p><p>i’ve never written reddie before so go easy on me</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Richie didn't know what he was mad about, but he was angry, and he didn't know what he was scared of, but he was scared. His heart was dancing a two step inside of his chest, and his head was spinning like a top, or whatever the fuck else is known for spinning. It was spinning so bad he felt almost sick, twisted. It felt like his head was about to fly off and hit the wall with a boneless ugly squelch, the sound you always hear about bodies making when some poor bastard jumps off the top of the Empire State Building, or some other skyscraper he didn't have a name for, because how many fucking skyscrapers have names that a sixteen year old fucking kid would know? Not many. He didn't know why he felt scared but he did. He didn't know why he felt sick the way you feel sick when you get off the spinning rides at the county fair and spew cotton candy and cheap marshmallow edibles into the candy coloured garbage cans, while some hapless fucking clown watches from across the lot, and you pretend the painted contours of his face don't make you wanna claw your eyes out. But, he felt it. Like a weight inside of his goddamn chest, he felt it.</p><p> </p><p>He felt like he was drowning, like it was a full body physical thing and not a feeling, like he wasn't weak and fucking pathetic for locking himself up inside a six by six goddamn box of a bathroom just to keep himself from blacking out again on the grass like the pansy he knew he wasn't (even though he definitely was). He could feel the bathroom tiles like knots all the way up his spine, unless his spine was the thing full of knots, or his stomach, or his overcrowded fairground game head spinning and spinning in knotted circles on his neck and his shoulders, and maybe the tiles were just this fake idea of knotted bullshit, and it's just him, hyperventilating on the bathroom floor. Stanley, the Boy Scout with a dozen badges for his neat perfectionist loops. Richie, the boy made of knots tied so loosely it'll take one little tug for him to fucking unravel. His glasses are fogged to shit in the dark, he can feel it, he can feel his own hot breath on his cheeks from the fetal position curl he's in on the floor, tiles under his back, head between his arms, trying to fight off tears, even though his breathless redness will give him away all the same. He swallows the spit in his mouth and it goes down as easily as swallowing playground pebbles.</p><p> </p><p>He had always done what the older kids dared him to on the playground, eating worms and rocks and little leaves, grabbing beetles from under rocks, eating them with malicious glee just so he could watch Eddie cry, let him frantically force him into the bathroom, tugging on the teachers sleeve with tiny hands, asking for permission to use the restroom because <em>Richie ate another bug, Miss, and Miss, to be perfectly honest with you, I fear for his wellbeing.</em> He wished he could go back to that. Go back to swallowing playground pebbles instead of bile and spit.</p><p> </p><p>He could smell the ugly smell of cleaner on the bathroom floor, feel the reek of it seeping into his bones like lemon and bleach and poison. He hated the bathroom then, the unforgiving tiles under his spine, the ugly lemon-bleach-poison smell of it, the reek underneath the lemon and the bleach and the poison that made his stomach churn, made his spinning head fly off and hit the wall. Squelch and smash like a raw egg does when you drop it at the store, and you kick it under the shelf so no one sees it but it leaves a smear of neon yellow like a trail of blood after you drag the body off a murder scene. He felt like the body on the murder scene. He felt like a shattered fucked up mess of a corpse. He felt like if you took the idea of a boy and ground it down to dust. He felt like an idea instead of a person, an idea that had been ground so fine it became nothing at all.</p><p> </p><p>He forced himself to sit against the wall. He forced himself to breathe. He forced himself to open his eyes and stare into the warm black of the dark. It felt the way it feels when you're a kid, and your parents leave you alone in the bathtub. You close your eyes and sink under to watch the entire world disappear, and it's just you, just the warm water and the inside of your eyelids and the hard porcelain of the bathtub under your hands. That peaceful feeling under the water before you open your dumb mouth to take a breath imagining it's air, and you feel betrayed, and you feel the water taking the place of the oxygen in your lungs, and you imagine what it would be like if you stayed down under the warm water forever. That's what he felt like, breathless and shaking on the bathroom floor.</p><p> </p><p>"Richie?" There was a soft knock on the door, and Eddie's voice on the other side. He swallowed spit and tears and spoke as loud as he dared, praying in a faithless way that his voice wouldn't crack and break and betray him.</p><p> </p><p>"Yeah!" He took a breath, there was a silence on the other side of the door, and it felt full of something. It could've been full of nothing. But Richie never felt like silences were empty with Eddie, with Eddie they were always full.</p><p> </p><p>"Are you okay? You've been in there for a while and Bev wanted me to check and make sure you didn't need a tampon or something." Eddie sounded dead nervous, so Richie forced a laugh, staring into the black insides of his eyelids like he was looking for stars to count.</p><p> </p><p>"Bevvie should know it's not shark week, our cycles are synced up, it's our little womanly secret. You know how it is between us girls." He could hardly force his own laugh out this time, and the silence after seemed even more full, even heavier, like Eddie's silences were injected with lead and his words were helium they could both float away on. Isn't that the joke behind Led Zeppelin? Isn't that what Richie's dad always joked about? Good ol' Went, that <em>this shit'll sink like a lead balloon.</em> That's what his dad always said when he had a bad idea. Sometimes things that were bad weren't Richie's idea, sometimes they just happened to him. Like the clown, or like spitting a wad of gum into Beverly's hair, or like this weird silence between them right now, between him and Eddie. Sometimes bad things are nobodies idea at all.</p><p> </p><p>"Are you sure you're okay, Rich?" He stared into the black dark and he swallowed another pebble in the shape of a shard of his shattered heart. He felt the pieces click together in his chest like a puzzle only he had the picture to solve, and he opened his mouth and said:</p><p> </p><p>"No, I'm not sure. I'm not sure at all, Eds." That weird heavy silence again, then:</p><p> </p><p>"What do you mean?" Richie stood on trembling doe-legs and opened the bathroom door, barely able to stand long enough to unlock it and push it open. Eddie looked smaller silhouetted in the hallway light, peering up at him with luminous brown eyes that were cast in his shadow, brown eyes that looked black in the velvet dark. "Oh, Richie." He grabbed him and held him mostly upright, leaving off the bathroom light, closing the door, and sinking to the floor with him. Eddie carefully took his glasses off the end of his nose and put them on Bill's bathroom counter, sitting carefully on the other wall, back pressed to it, feet in his little sneakers on the bathroom floor, the toes of his shoes just barely touching Richie's. "Do you wanna talk about it?"</p><p> </p><p>"I don't know."</p><p> </p><p>"You're the only one who can know, Rich."</p><p> </p><p>"I know but that doesn't mean I actually know, y'know?"</p><p> </p><p>"No, I don't." Eddie grabbed his hand, long fingered, splayed over his knees and shaking. "But I'll try to understand. You're my best friend, don't tell anyone, but you are." His voice was tiny, and fast, and fierce. "And if you think I won't try to understand you, try to help you with this, then what kind of best friend does that make me? A shitty one, a really fucking shitty one." Richie could feel his heartbeat in his fingertips, in the soles of his feet, like the pieces of his heart were sprinting around his body, like it was some kind of race, a race he would always lose because every fragment was cutting open the inside of his veins to make room for its sharp edged body. "You matter to me Richie, why are you trying to hide? I don't hide from you like this, I don't hide anything," Another jab, this one in the lungs, a full body feeling. "I'm honest with you. Always. So try. Please just try to explain it to me-"</p><p> </p><p>"I had a panic attack in Bill's bathroom because I realized I'm in love with you." Simple, concise, and absolutely goddamn life ruining.</p><p> </p><p>Richie stared at his silhouette in the dark and wished he had turned the lights on so he could memorize his face, memorize every curve and line and contour of it because he knew after this he would never see Eddie again. He wanted to remember the face of the boy he had fallen in love with, he wanted to remember something that wasn't the black dark and the cold bathroom tiles warming under their skin.</p><p> </p><p>"Richie-" He ripped his hand out of Eddie's, pulling it close and cradling it against his chest like he'd been burned.</p><p> </p><p>"Shut up. I know what you're gonna say, and if you're gonna say what I think you're gonna say, then just shut your goddamn mouth and get up and leave me here. I don't want to hear it."</p><p> </p><p>"Rich-"</p><p> </p><p>"Eddie, I told you to <em>shut up-</em>"</p><p> </p><p>"You shut up, you idiot!" Eddie's voice was shaking, he sounded angrier than Richie had ever heard him sound before. "I'm in love with you too, asshole, I have been the entire goddamn time I've known you." Richie stared at the empty warm black, at his silhouette like a shadow on the wall, incorporeal, but soft and solid, he imagined Eddie was a shadow on the wall and not a person he could reach out and touch, and he closed his eyes, and he stared at his silhouette like he was counting stars. He stared at Eddie like he stared into the inside of his eyelids. Blank. Empty. Full of nothing at all.</p><p> </p><p>“What?”</p><p> </p><p>“You heard me, asshole.” Eddie’s voice was as fierce as it always was, but it was shaking, and there was this unfamiliar edge of vulnerability to it that Richie had never heard from him before. He sounded terrified.</p><p> </p><p>“Where do we go from here?” He slumped against the bathroom wall and pulled his knees against his chest, his heart building a home inside of his throat. Eddie was staring at him, he couldn’t see his eyes, but he could feel his gaze burning into him, an ugly crawling feeling under his skin.</p><p> </p><p>“I don’t know.” They stayed like that in the dark, with the too-full silence between them, staring at their shadows, the warm black of the room getting colder and colder by the second, Richie’s heart freezing, his blood solidifying in his veins. He was made of stone. He was made of ice. Solid and ugly and cold. “But, I love you.” Eddie’s shaking voice drew him out of his head, cut through him like a knife cutting through wet paper. He could hear it in the tremble of his voice, feel it in the hanging, fragile silence between them. He was crying.</p><p> </p><p>Richie grabbed him, pulled him close against his chest, Eddie caught between his knees on the bathroom floor, the cold tiles warming under both of them. Richie could feel his silent tears turn into shaking sobs, his face tucked into the crook of his neck, he held him there and didn’t say a word, his silence shifting from a weighted fullness to an empty warmth, a comfort, a hand in Eddie’s soft hair, a hand on Eddie’s warm shoulder, smoothing circles into the back of his t-shirt.</p><p> </p><p>“I love you too.” Richie whispered, and he knew, somehow, that it was enough.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>i hope you enjoyed! kudos and comments are greatly appreciated :)</p></blockquote></div></div>
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